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4. Fault Lines: Mexico’s 1985 Earthquake and the Politics of Narration
- University of Virginia Press
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4 Fault Lines Mexico’s 1985 Earthquake and the Politics of Narration Absurd is the substance that collapses, that which is penetrated by emptiness, the hollow. No: substance cannot be destroyed, the form we give it is pulverized, our works are shattered. —José Emilio Pacheco, “Las ruinas de México” The solidarity of the people was really a seizing of power. —Carlos Monsiváis, Entrada libre The earthquake that convulsed Mexico City at 7:19 in the morning on September 19, 1985, altered irrevocably a generation’s view of life in Mexico. Despite a long and well-documented history of disasters in the area, appearing in texts as far back as pre-Columbian indigenous codices, no disaster in recent memory had affected the capital in such a drastic manner. Even prior earthquakes such as that of 1957, which caused notable damage to the capital and toppled the iconic Independence Angel from its perch on the Paseo de la Reforma, and the 1979 temblor that leveled the Universidad Iberoamericana did not compare to the violence with which the 1985 earthquake ruptured confidence in the Mexican government’s century-long project to transform Mexico into a unified, modern nation.1 Estimated at 8.1 on the Richter scale, with a 7.5 aftershock the following day, the sheer scope of the mortality and the physical destruction caused by the 1985 seismic movement seemed almost unimaginable to Mexico City’s residents, but it also thrust into doubt the solidity of the governmental edifice, which appeared to have crumbled along with institutional buildings such as the Secretaría de la Marina (Ministry of the Navy), the Secretaría de Trabajo (Ministry of Labor), the Secretaría de Comercio (Ministry of Commerce), the Secretaría de Comunicaciones (Ministry of Communications), and the Procuraduría de Justicia del Distrito Federal (Attorney General’s Office 146 Fault Lines of the Federal District). Many of the structures that secured the government ’s clientelistic relationship with its citizens—the Centro Médico, the Hospital Juárez, and federal housing projects in the Cuauhtémoc neighborhood —also came crashing down, burying under their rubble the very people they were charged with aiding. On a symbolic plane, at least, the transformation of the iconic Parque de la Seguridad Social, monument to the achievements of the welfare state, into an immense morgue overflowing with the cadavers of earthquake victims represented the demise of an era of institutionalized social order that had already entered into crisis with the 1982 collapse of the peso and President Miguel de la Madrid’s transition toward neoliberal economic policies.2 For many of the intellectuals who wrote about the disaster, the earthquake represented a political crisis more than a natural disaster. The seismic movement itself, although horribly frightening, was an unavoidable natural phenomenon. The disorganized response to the earthquake and generalized corruption in public works programs and the construction industry, which many observers believe led to the high mortality and material loss, however, fell squarely within the realm of human agency. These authors contended that the real problem was the state of the national body politic under the half-century rule of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI; Institutional Revolutionary Party), which had effectively disowned its citizens from any real political decision making. This discontent with the state of political agency under the PRI was further exacerbated by de la Madrid’s shift to neoliberal economic policies, which limited many of the social benefits that the PRI had used to offset the lack of democracy. From this point of view, the natural disaster only revealed a preexisting social and political disaster that had been obscured by the PRI’s politics of cooptation and the manipulation of the media. This chapter discusses two forms of cultural production that Mexican intellectuals engaged to document and theorize the experience of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. First, I examine the genre of the crónica, a kind of brief hybrid essay combining personal observation with social documentary that has been published in newspapers throughout Latin America since the nineteenth century. I argue that the Mexican earthquake crónicas were closely linked to the project of popular mobilization in the immediate response to the earthquake and the months after. Their function was to draw into the public eye issues of concern for the popular movements that arose from the experience of the earthquake, such as the lack of housing, corruption in the distribution of aid, and [3.237.46.120] Project MUSE (2024...